


i found brimstone in my garden

by anatomied



Series: send our love to its reward down in hell [1]
Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter/Funhaus RPF
Genre: Fake AH Crew, M/M, Pre-Fake AH Crew
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-13
Updated: 2017-01-13
Packaged: 2018-09-17 05:33:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9307598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anatomied/pseuds/anatomied
Summary: When Ryan Haywood joins the Fake AH Crew, it feels like the disparate pieces of his life are sewing themselves together.





	

**Author's Note:**

> If you've been wondering why I haven't posted anything for a while, take a look at that word count. I came in expecting this to be maybe five thousand. It turned into a monolith. Ray's character study (which will probably be just as long, because I'm predictable, and will likely include Ray's PoV on some of these same events) should be coming next - and then back to Dishonored things for a bit.
> 
> I also now have a Tumblr [here](http://horrorchic.tumblr.com)! I do accept writing prompts.

It is the third time the three of them have met. It is, interestingly, the first time they’ve gathered around a dead man.

Ryan put the body there. It’s not the first corpse he’s made with his hands and the closest knife he could find; it certainly won’t be the last. Blood pools closer to all of their shoes, staining the pavement crimson. It almost turns black in the dim lighting. After taking a few moments to observe, Geoff makes an odd little contemplative noise. “God damn. You must have been one fucked up kid when you were growing up.”

Ryan adjusts his grip on the knife. He knows what Geoff’s thinking - burning ants with a magnifying glass and hunting down neighborhood dogs.

Intestines glisten wetly near Jack’s sneakers.

The thing is that Geoff is wrong. Ryan isn’t _that kid_ , knows he isn’t. There is a precision to everything he does. Mess comes with the profession, of course. But that doesn’t mean you have to be messy about everything else. It would’ve been hard being _that kid_ anyway with everything else that was happening. With his father. It sounds like a sob story, like a killer’s backstory, and maybe it is, but Ryan had half a dozen other choices he could’ve made.

He dropped out of college. He left computer science and theater. He left a life with easily understandable results. He left relative safety for Los Santos. Even now, he has the resume and the experience. He could work the nine-to-five. He could go home and sleep and wake up again.

Or: this.

Ryan knows what he’d choose. He’d choose it again every single time.

Geoff is visibly working the mental calculations. He looks between Ryan and the body again. “Alright,” the crew’s leader says cautiously, “you have almost got yourself a deal, buddy, but I don’t like working with creepy faceless fucks. So are you going to take off the mask? Because, like, we’ve got a pretty damn good sniper - little bit of a happy trigger finger, though, if you get what I’m saying - and the last thing I need is for you to be wandering around not in heist gear and get shot because he doesn’t recognize you and he was bored.”

What people don’t get is that the mask is really for show.

The other people he’s worked for around Los Santos have made up plenty of more nefarious rumors. The story goes like this, usually: Haywood is secretly someone fucking well-known, true celebrity status in more than one way. Or he’s got some kind of deformity, which is very _Phantom of the Opera_ , but not true at all. It’s about persona. So Ryan reaches up with the hand not busy with the knife and tugs the mask off easily. He lets it dangle from his hand by the strap.

Geoff gapes at him. Jack folds his arms and as if expecting Ryan to just pull off his face and expose another different face beneath.

“Dude,” Geoff bursts out after a couple stunned seconds, “what the _fuck_ have you been trying to hide with that mask? I’m going to lose my fucking bet with Gavin.”

“Who?” Ryan asks, wiping the knife off on his jeans.

“Gavin,” Geoff says distractedly. “Fucking idiot. Moron. Dumb fuck. Thought you were disfigured or some shit. Overdramatic little bitch.” He’s tapping away at his phone as he says it. Probably informing this Gavin that he lost the bet.

“I see,” Ryan agrees. He really doesn’t.

Jack neatly intercedes, which seems to be the man’s job - an informal kind of translator when Geoff’s too astounded to form English sentences. “Gavin’s a great negotiator, and sometimes manages to make these amazing ricochet shots by accident in firefights, but mostly, he’s a dumbass.”

Geoff is still muttering angrily under his breath as he pockets his phone. Finally he looks up at Ryan again. “Alright. How about I buy you a drink to celebrate your semi-official induction into the crew?”

“Make that a diet Coke, and I’ll say yes.”

Jack pauses again. “The Vagabond, a well-known - infamous, even - mercenary, would rather drink a diet Coke than anything else.”

“Yup.” Ryan slides the knife back into its sheath and folds his arms. “Never liked to drink.”

“Holy shit,” Geoff proclaims, holding his hand out over the body. There’s lots of visual symbolism there that Ryan’s former theater director would’ve had a damn field day over. Two criminals quite literally sealing a deal over a corpse, blood and guts everywhere. Picturesque, one could say. “You are something special.”

Ryan smiles thinly. “I hope so.” He shakes Geoff’s hand and keeps smiling.

\---

First time Ryan killed anyone, it was more of a necessary accident than anything else.

He had been out back behind a bar with a college friend - friend of a friend, really, but Ryan was the designated driver and thus the guy who was sober enough to help people out back to throw up. That was what he was doing. He helped this skinny little fuck out back, patting him on the back and saying all the required niceties. It was going fine. Maybe he knew that this guy had some criminal connections - gang or cartel, he wasn’t sure at the time, but something was there.

Ryan moved back a couple inches as the guy leaned over to throw up. Jesus. This shouldn’t have been his life. He was twenty-five, for God’s sake, but he hadn’t been able to pick a major for shit.

Some things had gone down, things that Ryan doesn’t care to talk about. It was a bad night to be out back behind the bar with this guy. Someone had a debt out to collect. That same someone rounded the corner with a knife, and Ryan can’t really remember their face any more. If he thinks about it, he can maybe establish a hair color underneath a hood - black or dark brown. That’s how little it mattered in the years afterwards.

The guy in the hoodie came forward, threatening and trying to get Ryan to head back inside, _let me take care of your buddy here, okay, don’t cause problems_.

The issue: Ryan had always loved being a problem - an unassuming problem, though.

So the guy got aggressive, pulled a knife, and the prospective stabbing victim was already starting to stammer out excuses - _I didn’t sell him out, I swear, oh my fucking God_.

And Ryan got annoyed. He gets annoyed easy, you see, always has. He had - has - a short temper with people that he doesn’t give a shit about. So he pulled the knife he always kept on him, and he threw, and the thunk of the blade through the sternum was like a damn thunderclap. It ended something. It began something else.

Long story short: he ended up sort of joining a gang. No one in said gang believed in him for a while, because, well, Ryan’s entire _face_ is genetically engineered to be the least criminal thing on the planet. Blue eyes, stubble, sharp but not _too_ sharp features, sandy hair, a grin a former girlfriend had called “adorable and maybe kind of evil, but in a cute way.”

She had also told him he probably could’ve been a model. He told her he would have to be a lot more desperate to get involved in that.

But he had a knack for knives and guns and something softly intimidating that turned harsher over time.

He dropped out of college in his junior year because he did the math one night, alone in his dorm, and it turned out he could make more in one year of freelance work killing people who didn’t matter than in a year and a half sitting behind a desk on a computer. So sue him. The work paid, and Ryan was willing to do it. Over the six months of being part of this little gang in Savannah, he had learned a few interesting facts about himself. Not the kind of facts you’d use at speed dating, of course, but interesting nevertheless.

Firstly: he had more personal ambition than Savannah’s criminal scene could support. Secondly: he had a natural talent for killing that probably had some resonance back when he was younger. Thirdly: there was some visceral enjoyment that he got out of watching someone bleed out and knowing that he had caused it. He didn’t like to dwell on that last one for too long. Dwelling got you into bad headspaces - headspaces that he didn’t like, where he just wanted to keep _going_ and _going_ and _going_ , cutting people to pieces.

College had always been a bad fit for him. He was good at college, which people often thought was the same thing as the best option. It wasn’t. It just took finding the alternative option to figure that out.

He was sitting in another class for his major, animation this, programming that, and Ryan had found himself drifting and thinking about what he needed to do after this class. He had to go down to the gun store and pick up some more ammunition. Then he had to shoot a text over to one of his contacts living downtown, but really, he just kind of wanted to cut the Achilles tendon of this guy three seats down and one row up. He’d been hitting on this incredibly uninterested and probably kind of freaked out girl next to him. Wouldn’t shut up.

So around the time he started realizing that murdering his classmates would be an easy option to fix some of his issues - yeah. He got out. His counselor was fucking floored, and they spent a good week trying to get him to stick around, but Ryan knew himself better.

He has a short temper, after all. It could’ve taken nothing and he might have snapped.

Not that the target didn’t deserve it. But Ryan didn’t want to blow his cover on something as worthless as one stupid fucking college student.

Again: ambition was something he had in God damn spades.

\---

It takes exactly two minutes for the rest of the crew - all younger than Jack and Geoff - to start asking invasive questions. Curly Hair and British One are the ones asking questions, at any rate. There’s the third unknown member at the other end of the table, a DS raised in front of his face, that doesn’t seem to be engaging at all. Ryan can respect that, honestly.

Then, British One just has to open his fucking mouth (like he’s been opening it for the past ten minutes, to be fair). “Is it true you worked with Doll Face?”

Ryan’s fingers tighten imperceptibly on his glass of diet Coke. He sees the guy at the other end of the table look up from his DS as if he heard the motion - dark hair and glasses, a hint of stubble. Young as Curly Hair and British Fuck, which means this crew’s got three versus three on either side of an line at about thirty years old.

British One has definitely been demoted from his first title all the way down to British Fuck. Ryan tries his hardest not to think about yanking a garrote through British Fuck’s scrawny little neck. It’s never good to wish murder upon your new crewmates. Not a good practice to get into. Ryan does have an easy trigger finger, and he can’t make a casual mistake like that.

“Yes,” Ryan says shortly. He doesn’t say anything else.

British Fuck opens his mouth again, and Ryan can almost imagine the slew of questions that are about to spew out. He takes a sip of diet Coke in order to stall just so he can wade through the river of bullshit. If he had known that he was going to be subject to an informal interrogation by a loud squawking twenty-something, he might’ve taken longer to consider Geoff’s lovely offer of crew membership.

The guy on the DS finally talks. “Gavin,” he says, which is the name of the British one, apparently, “shut the fuck up and leave him alone. God. He just got here. He doesn’t want to be interrogated by your dumb ass.”

“I was just asking questions,” British Fuck - or Gavin, whatever - protests. Gavin. That’s the guy Geoff mentioned, the guy who thought Ryan was disfigured. Somehow Ryan isn’t surprised.

“You wouldn’t fucking stop asking questions, you mean,” points out Curly Hair. Ryan likes him and the kid with the DS so far.

“Ray,” Gavin says in the general direction of the DS, “why do you hate me so much?”

“I don’t hate you, dude. I just hate your personality, and your face, and all the shit you do. So yeah, actually, I do hate you, now that I think about it.” Then he sets the DS down in order to form his hands into a little heart shape at Gavin, only to look utterly disgusted a millisecond later.

Gavin chuckles with a little bit of hurt behind it. “So much vinegar, Ray.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Ray (apparently) mutters, picking the DS back up. “I want to chop my own fucking hands off at the wrist.”

“I could help with that,” Ryan says evenly.

“Did Geoff import a fucking medieval torturer-slash-time-traveler or some shit without telling us,” Ray demands, expression wonderfully flat. He seems entirely serious, and Ryan honestly cannot wait to learn his tells. Everyone has some.

“Nah. I’m from Georgia.” It’s more than he’s told nearly anyone else in one simple sentence.

Ray pushes up his glasses a little, his gaze already drifting back down to his game. “Georgia counts as medieval as shit, in my opinion.”

That one makes Ryan laugh. Okay. So maybe he shouldn’t be picking favorites quite this early, but fuck it. The choice is clear. He’ll probably regret it later, but anything’s better than dealing with Gavin more than he has to. Maybe Gavin’ll grow on him. Maybe he won’t. This whole crew situation might be temporary, after all. Nothing is set in stone.

Ryan tilts his head. “So. Ray. What’s your job here? I know we’ve got demolitions, and some dipshit who never shuts the hell up.”

“You’re a prick, aren’t you,” Gavin begins.

Ray seems to do this thing where he stares at his DS while answering questions. Even while interrupting Gavin. “I’m a sniper.”

“He’s _the_ sniper.” Michael offers this correction while spreading his arms as if presenting Ray for Ryan’s inspection. “No one better in the whole city of Los Santos.” And he punches Ray in the shoulder a little too hard. Ray’s expression twitches slightly. It’s almost precious.

“The best sniper in Los Santos is a Puerto Rican kid that looks like a stiff wind would blow him over.” Despite Ray being his current favorite, Ryan can’t just let this kind of thing go. It’s not the impression he was expecting.

“Puerto Rican pride, baby,” Ray enunciates. He lifts up one hand in the vague approximation of what a gang sign would look like to someone who’s never seen a gang sign in their entire life. There’s no emotion there, either. And Ryan cracks a smile at that too. What an odd group. What a strange collection.

They almost don’t look like criminals from this angle. They look like the kinds of people Ryan knew years ago in college, like they should be pursuing degrees and nine-to-five data entry jobs in the next few years.

Yet, as some of the science classes Ryan took told him: all ordered systems, no matter how clean they look, move towards a natural state of chaos.

\---

Speaking of chaos.

Look, Doll Face - Meg, really, always Meg - tried to kill him. James Ryan Haywood disappeared from Savannah and the gang affiliations there. Someone put a price on his head for it, just in case he was out to backstab them. Ryan (as his name was from then on) wasn’t actually out to backstab them. He stole a new car, set his old one on fire sixty miles outside of Savannah, and started driving. There were things he meant to do. Running into a hired gun in the middle of Louisiana wasn’t one of them.

Meg told him later that she had passed through Savannah and picked up on the offer from his old gang maybe a day or two after his disappearance. They hadn’t waited for him to turn up again or crawl out of a shallow grave. If he had died, they wanted to be sure. Ryan could appreciate that kind of insurance policy. When most people think something’s buried, after all, they’re rarely smart enough to check.

He had been standing outside of a gas station in Shreveport, Louisiana.

That’s a day he remembers clearly, among all the other strange days of his life.

The wind had picked up something fierce, carrying the river inland a little. Ryan was facing the street, as per usual, because if anyone was going to attempt a drive-by, he’d know. The only other person at the gas station was a young woman, maybe early twenties at the latest, next to a rickety old sedan. The two of them had been standing there in silence for a few minutes. Ryan let his gaze drift along the road idly.

The only reason he didn’t end up with a knife in between his vertebrae in the next ten seconds was because, just maybe, he’d suspected. She was young and pretty but that didn’t mean a damn thing in this business, and he heard the tiniest footstep behind him.

Ryan spun around and kept his pistol low, aimed right at her gut. The knife in the woman’s hand glinted in the afternoon sun.

“Shit,” she said.

He smiled, soft and slow. “Hi.”

“You’re James Haywood,” she began, and it wasn’t a question. He appreciated that kind of certainty. “There’s a lot of money if I bring back -”

“Proof of death,” he finished for her. “I know. And I like Ryan more than James, if you wouldn't mind.”

“You’re not running very fast, though.” She’s smart, then. He watches as she retracts the knife and slips into it some sheath - probably along the small of her back. He’s sure she’s strapped along her leg or ankle. One knife isn’t sufficient for people like them. Ryan lowers the gun but only by a few inches. She seems to understand. He’s the one with a price out on him right now, after all.

He shrugged. “They don’t scare me all that much, to be honest.”

She laughed. She had a light laugh, a delicateness to it that he sort of felt like was a ploy. “Big tough guy, huh?” Her tone told him exactly what she thought of that.

“Nah. Not really. They’re just dumbasses.”

The woman tilted her head. “I mean. True but a little mean.” There was a bright spark in her eyes.

“Any particular reason you’re not trying to gut me right now? Good knife for that, by the way.”

“You’re going to laugh. But I get a good feeling from you.”

Ryan stared at her for a moment. “You are the first person to say that to me in a year straight. I have personally fucking engineered myself to give off only the worst impression.”

Then she giggled. It sounded a lot more genuine than her previous laugh, a little bit of a snort involved. “It’s - It’s your face, I think. You look like a guy who goes golfing every week or something and teaches high schoolers.”

“I see where you could get that. I’ve gone golfing before.” He was thinking of smashing a guy’s head in with a golf club, but whatever. In their world that basically counted as the exact same thing.

She raised a perfect eyebrow. “No, you haven’t.”

“Nope. I haven’t. So who are you. Unless that’s rude to ask.”

“Doll Face,” she said easily. “That’s what people call me.”

He scoffed a little. “Is that supposed to be a joke? It sort of sounds like an insult, if we’re going to be real here. Like something one of my shittier Georgian relatives who didn’t graduate high school would call a girl way, way too young for them on the street.”

She made a disgusted face. “Now you’re making it creepy.”

“Because it’s creepy.” Ryan slid the pistol back into its holster. Concealed carry was and always will be such a blessing, honestly. “Now, you tell me: what do you want? You’re not trying to shoot me. I’m definitely not getting into your car or anything. So what’s the deal?” He leaned back a little against the car door.

“I’ve got a big, big job in the works,” she said slowly. “I could do it alone, but it looks like more of a two-man job. So here’s the deal. You help me, and I don’t make phone calls back to Savannah. In fact, if everything goes fine, I could still make some phone calls, but very different ones.” She was obviously blackmailing him, but cloaked in different terms.

Ryan slid his hands into his pockets. “I see you’re not above blackmail.”

“Do I fucking look like I’m above blackmail?”

“Yes, actually.”

Her smile was a clean and small thing. “Good. That’s the point.”

\---

It takes a good two weeks for Ryan to actually do anything as part of the illustrious Fake AH Crew. The two weeks in question were spent being pretty much told to shut the fuck up and watch. As if he’s somehow unfamiliar with intimidating people into getting what he wants. Admittedly, he’s never seen someone get things done in quite the way these people do.

For example: Gavin Free is a fucking idiot, and he must have some kind of godly luck in order to survive for this long.

The crew is caught in some kind of skirmish with another local gang. Negotiations haven’t gone well - in fact, a few of their rival’s guys tried to get into a car pursuit to hunt down Geoff.

Unfortunately for them, Jack just happened to be driving. The guys in that car didn’t live very long, and their cars were pretty much just twisted hunks of burning metal afterwards.

“So, Haywood,” Geoff says sixteen days into this prolonged guerilla campaign, “we actually need you to do shit now. Time to get off your ass and pull your weight, considering we’ve been letting you stay in the penthouse, feeding you, shelter, all that good shit.”

“Aw. Vacation’s over.”

“Yeah. Consider this your initiation, but part two.” The whole crew is assembled around the kitchen counter. Everyone’s a little on edge. No one makes an attempt on anyone’s life without retribution, especially not Geoff’s life. Jack’s still got some bruises from some of the more harrowing moments of that whole car chase. “How many guys do you think you can kill on your own?”

“A few,” Ryan says, which isn’t a number, but who knows, really. He’s never counted.

“Okay.” Geoff nods. “Here’s the plan. This is their base of operations - this tiny warehouse on the outskirts of Los Santos. Fucking shithole, to be honest, but whatever. Can’t judge them. We started out in some real bad places. But we’re going to walk in there, and we’re going to kill every single one of them.”

“Simple.” Ryan nods. “I like that.”

“So me, Jack, and Gavin are going to be drawing police attention away from the rest of you. Michael, you’re setting up enough explosives to make sure no one can even bury them. Ray, you’re providing support. And, uh - Ryan. The task of killing or, you know, fucking crippling and maiming, is really up to you here, buddy. Don’t let us down on that one.”

They give him an earpiece. It’s cute. Not that he’s going to need it or anything.

“Okay.” Ryan pauses. “I’ll grab a shotgun.”

“That’s it?” Michael asks skeptically.

Ryan stares at him. “And some pistols. And some knives. If you really want, I can bring my minigun along.”

“Your _minigun_ ,” Gavin squawks.

Ryan rolls his eyes. “At least one of you has to own a minigun. Come on. I can’t be the only one here who thought about, y’know, after some time playing the original Doom, that a minigun would be really useful for mowing down way too many people in a short period of time.” He fucking knows they like video games. As much as they tried to make themselves seem like professional suave criminals in front of him, Ray wasted pretty much no time in gluing himself to the Xbox whenever he showed up.

“You’re a Doom kind of guy?” Jack asks, leaning a few inches closer.

Ryan shrugs. “Quake, actually. Sorry to say.”

Ray’s mouth is open by a few degrees. It abruptly snaps closed. “You guys are such old pieces of shit,” he enunciates. “Oh my fucking God.”

“Fuck off,” Jack and Ryan pretty much say at the same time.

The arrangements are made.

It actually goes smoother than any of their future heists ever will. Everyone seems to be on their best behavior, though. It’s probably to compensate for even the chance that Ryan might not be what they expect. But Ryan shows up with a shotgun, two pistols, and three knives. It’s a messy business.

But it’s actually fun.

Ryan has this suspicion that he won’t have to actually turn his interest in murder down too much. Listening to the way Michael fucking _cackles_ as he sets up explosives tells him exactly what kind of group this is. It’s the kind he likes. A little bit of mayhem - or a lot of mayhem - is a very, very good thing to these people. So, yeah, okay. Maybe after a few years of wandering around the United States, he might’ve found a group that fits him.

They pull up a block away from the warehouse.

Ray’s voice filters in through Ryan’s earpiece. “Looking pretty busy. Four - no, five on the second floor. Two guys at the main entrance smoking and looking like loitering pieces of shit. One guy at the side.”

“Side entrance, then.” Michael yanks one of the assault rifles out from the backseat.

Ryan smiles at him. That’s a cute thought. “No. Front entrance.”

“Are you - are you serious?”

“Yeah.”

Michael whistles a little. “You’re fucking crazy. I mean, I like it. But you’re still crazy.”

Ray, from the rooftop, definitely outraged: “Did you just fucking say the front entrance?”

“Yup.” Ryan reaches into the glovebox and tugs on the mask. He’s grinning the whole time, adrenaline pumping through his veins. “Come on. Trust me.”

He opens the driver’s door and pops the trunk. The shotgun is a familiar weight in his hand.

“Ray, we’re probably going to die,” Michael says distantly even as he opens the passenger’s door and gets out. “In case you didn't get that.”

“Cool, dude.” Ray’s voice buzzes through with static and wind. “I’ll raid your apartment for valuable shit so Gavin doesn’t break all of it by accident.”

Michael starts taking the grenades he brought out of the back, plus the fucking garden variety of explosives he towed along. Let it be known that Ryan has never followed speed limits and laws more than after he saw the metric ton of bombs and Michael decided was necessary for one shitty warehouse that could probably be blown over by a particularly bad storm. He gets his voice all choked up, though. “Ray,” Michael says, a smile twitching at his jaw, “Ray, I love you, man.”

“Stop making it weird.”

“Aw, fuck you.”

Ryan tilts his head up towards the roof that Ray is supposedly posted on. “You guys done getting all the post-mortem shit ready?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Michael says. And as they start walking towards the warehouse, Ryan holding the shotgun between his hands, Ryan distinctly hears him mumbling. “Fuckin’ _post-mortem_ , who the hell says that, honestly.”

“A pretentious fuck,” Ray says loudly, static cutting through his syllables harsher than ever. Ryan speeds up his pace a little to distract himself, because really, look at these kids thinking they’re something else. One of the guys at the entrance looks up from scuffing something on the asphalt with his shoe. He hits his friend in the shoulder and he looks up too. One of them starts to reach for a gun, confusion and slowly encroaching terror clearly evident in his expression.

Ryan focuses. He locks himself in, or lets himself out, depending on how you look at it.

“Aren’t you guys sweet,” Ryan says, adjusting his earpiece just to make sure Ray hears him, and blows the guy to the left in half.

The second guy yelps as blood and gore splatters him and he scrambles for the gun. Ryan wastes no time in swiveling neatly and pulling the trigger again. The sound is deafening, but it gets the point across pretty thoroughly.

A guy sprints around the corner, sliding a little in his hurry - the one posted at the side entrance, probably. Ryan yanks a pistol from his belt and shoots him in the head.

Michael’s standing a few feet behind Ryan, his own pistol halfway raised. “Holy shit,” he says.

Ray’s voice is a little muted. “Well, why don’t I just go the hell home at this point. Jason fucking Bourne here has it on lock.”

“Hey,” Ryan says, “you want to shoot someone, go ahead. I’m sure as hell not stopping you.”

There’s this long-suffering sigh from his earpiece. “Alright. I guess.”

The window above them explodes outwards. Michael ducks to the side and Ryan wastes no time in surging forward and kicking down the door. The whole place is rickety and old, near collapse at any second, and the door practically collapses when his boot connects with it.

Ryan learns quite a lot over the fight.

They’re fun. That’s the thing. Most of the crews Ryan’s briefly joined up with have been these self-serious backstabbing affairs. And there’s nothing to say that the Fake AH Crew _aren’t_ backstabbers and serious criminals. But they have this tongue-in-cheek nature to everything they do. The heists matter, but the drama matters more. The _spectacle_ matters. He figures that out when Ray’s bullet whips right past Ryan and sinks right into a guy’s chest. Ray whoops loudly in his ear, but there’s something a little sarcastic about it all.

“I’m so fucking good, you guys,” Ray proclaims.

“Shut up,” Michael’s voice crackles. “Focusing here so I don’t blow us the hell up.”

“You shut the fuck up,” Ray says.

“Both of you shut up,” Ryan offers in between putting three bullets in a guy’s chest.

It takes twenty minutes to clear the warehouse entirely and set up the explosives. Ryan gets out with a few scrapes, a cut along his arm from one particularly determined kid with a knife, and a bruise where a bullet impacted on the bulletproof vest. Not bad.

He runs into Michael again right as Ryan grabs a guy by the back of the neck and jams a knife through his spine. He twists a little and the guy screams, thrashes a little while he still has motor control, and collapses as Ryan yanks the knife back out. Michael’s eyes are wide, body language still, around four feet away.

Ryan drops the corpse to the ground. “Hey,” he says.

“... Hi.” Michael’s tone is wary, as if he’s just caught Ryan doing something like stabbing a long dead and desiccated corpse fifty times or whatever. Ryan’s done something like that before, sure, but this was just a knife in the spine and a little bit of a twist. Not a big deal. “Got a problem with that guy or something?”

Ryan’s lips twitch upwards into a smile behind the mask. “Nope.” He pops the _puh_ sound gently.

“Ah.” Michael heads around him to go set up some more explosives. “More power to you, I guess.”

Eight minutes away from the warehouse, speeding away in an SUV, of all things, Ryan glances in the rearview mirror as Michael triggers the explosives. The whole street rocks a little, ground shaking and shuddering. Metal and fire bursts upwards into the sky for a good half of a mile, setting off alarms and shattering glass.

“Shit,” Ray says.

Michael chuckles again. “Damn right,” he agrees. His phone starts ringing. It takes him a few seconds to fumble around with barely trembling hands in order to answer. “Geoff? Yeah. We’re good. Place went sky fucking high, which I’m pretty sure you saw. How was - oh, yeah. Look. I’ll talk to you later about how those new explosives worked. Uh-huh. Sure. See you in a minute.” He hangs up immediately.

“Geoff’s happy?” Ryan asks. He’s looking at Ray in the rearview mirror the whole time, though. The sniper’s already extracted his DS from the purple hoodie he seems to wear everywhere, as if he didn’t spend the last thirty minutes killing living breathing people.

Michael nods. “Yeah. Geoff’s very fucking happy.”

\---

Three days into their partnership, Ryan found out Doll Face’s name was Meg.

Ryan discovered this odd fact by accident. He was sitting in her apartment and someone left a voicemail. _Hi, Meg, it’s Karen - we can totally go out for coffee next week if you want, ‘cause I’m in town for a few weeks before the spring semester! Christmas coming early, right? Call me!_ Meg herself was downstairs at that moment, towing trash out to the dumpster.

He didn’t tell her that he knew. He kept calling her Doll Face - didn’t call her _doll_ because that would just add all kinds of creepy undertones to their relationship.

They were - well, they weren’t a _thing_ , definitely. They were partners, though. Meg wanted to rob a bank. Ryan thought it was a four man job if they wanted to be safe about it, but Meg was convinced that the two of them can pull it off. “You’ll need something to cover up that face,” she told him. “You’ll attract the Savannah bounty. Or, you know, women.”

“Women,” Ryan repeated incredulously.

“Yeah. Hate to burst your bubble, but you’ve got looks.” She smacked his shoulder gently. “Tell you what. I’ll dig around at some Halloween places and see if I can pick up any mask that isn’t, you know, too much of a joke.”

It took a month of planning the actual heist before they got around to the mask problem. Meg always used her face to her advantage - she’s pretty and young and men (and women) would fall over themselves to do what she wanted. Ryan, however, had a bounty out on him, which created larger problems. So it had to be a mask. Ryan was still all about theater at heart, of course. He wouldn’t deny that a part of him loved the dramatic nature of the idea. Robbing a bank, _and_ wearing a mask. Dreams did come true.

On a Wednesday night she came back with a plastic bag and tossed it down onto the coffee table. “Take your pick,” she said.

He lined the selection up on the coffee table in front of him, the plastic bag drifting to the floor. Most of them were stock standard Halloween merchandise. They were in an off-season, after all, looking at the middle of May to dress up like ghouls and goblins. He pushed aside a few clown masks and barely suppressed disgust at a few of the campier animal ones. Eventually Ryan’s hands settled on something simple - a skull mask, painted black, a thicker strap than the rest around the back. Nothing too offensive about it. And it seemed a little more ready for some wear and tear.

“What do you think,” he asked. She was the local expert on style, after all.

Meg tilted her head. “I think it’s probably the least offensive one of the bunch. Pretty bad selection, though. Here. Put it on. I’ll see if it needs work.”

He tugged it on. The eyes were wide enough to not mess with his peripherals, thank God. His breathing was oddly loud, but if anything, it would let him know if he was hyperventilating when injured and wasting good air.

Meg stared at him. She squinted slightly. “Alright, nevermind, take it off. I’ve got an idea.”

As he tugged the skull mask off, she disappeared into her room for a minute. Ryan turned the mask over in his hands, running his fingers along the curves and ridges, until she came back a few minutes later with some makeup.

“Seriously?” he began.

“Tilt your head up,” Meg instructed, ignoring him as she turned on some more lights.

After a moment of raising his eyebrow Ryan acquiesced, tilting his head up slightly. “You’re going to have to pay me back for all of this eyeliner,” she told him as she uncapped a thin marker-looking thing and began applying it around his eyes. They sat there in silence for a few moments. “Okay. Close your eyes.” He kept still as she applied whatever it was to his eyes. Eventually she switched to something soft and a little more brush-like.

“Are you smudging it?” he asked.

“How did you know that?”

“I was in theater for a little while in college. Makeup was a thing.”

“No shit,” she mumbled. “Theater boy. Bet you were picking up all the girls.”

Ryan chuckled softly. Not true at all, but he’d let her have the benefit of the doubt.

He heard her step back. There was the click of the cap going back on what she was using. “Alright. You’re good. This would be easier with paint, obviously, but - I figured we should test it. Go ahead and put the mask on.” He tugged the mask back down and blinked a little at the brightness of the light. Something kept catching on his eyelashes, which was a little distracting. Meg nudged his chin back up. She nodded after another inspection. “See, that’s going to look way better. Blends your eyes in with the mask. Makes you look certifiably more terrifying.” She shoved him.. “Go and look.”

Ryan headed over to the bathroom.

It was a - little intimidating, he’d admit. The mask fit well, and with the addition of the eyeliner, his eyes stood out very, very bright against the mask. It cast shadows. With the right jacket, the right outfit - this could be something interesting. An image. A persona. A good thing to hide behind, to create the thinnest dotted line between who he was here with the mask on, and who he could allow himself to be everywhere else.

He pushed the mask up enough to see his eyes. Well, he looked like a fucking mess underneath. Eyeliner’s smudged all around his eyes in a way some people might call artfully messy, but it also summons up memories of a college party gone wrong. Or right, depending on who you asked. Ryan chuckled a little to himself and rubbed some of the eyeliner off with his index finger.

Meg walked up behind him. “It’s going to look shitty with the mask off, idiot,” she pointed out with a small smile.

“I know,” he admitted. “I’m just getting used to it. It’s not like I haven’t been in greasepaint before, either. I can pick some black paint up at some point - it’ll be easier to use than eyeliner in the long term.”

“You’re going to need a name too,” Meg reminded him, stepping out of the doorway to let him pass by back into the living room. He rubbed the eyeliner a little more, smudging it a little more thoroughly. He’d have to be careful for right now with this kind of thing - eyeliner came off a lot more easily than greasepaint. “Or at least something nice and catchy so people’ll start remembering your name.”

He tugged the mask entirely off and ran his fingers along the inside, checking for any eyeliner that might’ve rubbed off on the rubber. Really, though, Ryan was thinking. Nouns were good. Nouns that were catchy or unique were even better, but nothing too long that might make people think he’s a pretentious piece of shit. He was just that. But people didn’t need to know that with the persona and all. He glanced up at her as he settled on the couch again.

“Here’s an idea,” Ryan offered. “Vagabond. Maybe with a _the_ in front of it, which might sound better, but vagabond’s a good word. Distinct. Makes sense. Guy who wanders around. That’s my plan for the next couple years, ‘cause I learned after the shit in Savannah that I’m not a group person.”

“Vagabond,” Meg muttered. She tapped manicured nails on the coffee table. “I don’t know anyone called that. But before we run around getting that name well-known, I’ll make sure you’re not stealing anyone else’s favorite nickname.”

“Oh, yeah. Plagiarism’s some bad shit.”

“Like you care that much.”

Ryan clutched a hand to his chest. “Please,” he said. “I went to college. I sat through the lectures. I know plagiarism’ll just get me thrown out of the international mercenary league.”

\---

By eleven that night, everyone’s passed out drunk in celebration. Well, almost everyone. Ryan’s still awake, his mask off and revealing the complicated array of face paint he now wears. Ray disappeared from the party halfway through. It meant it was up to Ryan to lug everyone who was still somewhat conscious back to their rooms and tilt them onto their sides in case they threw up. Just college all over again. Geoff mumbled something that sounded like a _thank you_ and Gavin sounded a little like he was sobbing.

But Ryan didn’t mind as much as he used to. Age was truly mellowing him, maybe. Or he just didn’t house a lot of animosity yet towards this crew.

He taps away at his phone for a while, sitting on the couch and reading up on the news. The warehouse explosion is the highlight reel of the night. Footage keeps playing over and over again, a looping visit of what he just inflicted on Los Santos. He leans forward after a moment, watching this nice aerial shot of the building going up in flames and shrapnel.

He could get very, very used to this kind of thing. The scale’s what he’s not used to. He can only do so much on his own, but this is something else entirely.

A young newscaster has her best concerned look pasted on. Her voice is tinny as it leaks out of his phone’s speaker. _Authorities are still attempting to identify the perpetrators, but there are rumors that the infamous Fake AH Crew may have been involved. Is this a stunt leading up to their next attempted heist or just another day in Los Santos? At six, we’ll talk with former police chief Mike Vasquez about what few details are known about the crew itself. Now, over to Melanie for the weather_.

“Are you watching the fucking news, dude?” a voice demands from across the room. Ryan glances up and catches Ray standing there with a bag of chips in one hand and his own phone in the other. No DS this time, it seems. “Seriously?”

“Just seeing how much the media’s figured out,” Ryan replies evenly. That’s not true at all. He likes the brand of attention this crew gets, to put it simply. He likes how easily Los Santos just _accepts_ the fact that there are these incredibly wealthy criminals in their midst. Nor does he buy that shit about there being few known details. Were Ryan a betting man, he’d bet that the cops know exactly who the Fake AH Crew is, or at least where they are. But the fact is that arresting them would destroy the myth.

Every big city needs a few good criminals.

Ray pins him down with a skeptical look. “Okay,” he says. “Sure.” After a moment he collapses onto the rest of the couch that Ryan isn’t sitting on. A hand mechanically moves chips from the bag into Ray’s mouth for a few minutes, the only sound between them the quiet chomping. Ryan fixes his attention back on his phone.

A few minutes later, the bag crinkles as Ray rolls it up and tosses it into the trash can on his way up towards the television.

He picks up two Xbox controllers from their position near the television. Wordlessly, he marches all the way back over and shoves one at Ryan.

Ryan raises an eyebrow.

“Hey,” Ray says, “you sit on my couch after everyone’s passed out, taking up valuable real estate, you have to play video games.”

“This isn’t your couch, and you aren’t the police.”

“It is my couch on heist nights after everyone else has gotten wasted. Don’t question it. It’s the law.”

Ryan sighs and accepts the controller. No point in arguing.

They play Call of Duty together for a while. Ray’s choice. It’s an oddly companionable silence. Ray’s focused on the screen and Ryan’s focused on figuring out what the hell Ray’s doing out here after thirty minutes of killing earlier today. He picks up the mechanics of the game fast enough, even if it’s obvious that Ray is by far the more skilled player here. Ryan figures that out when Ray navigates into the options and sets up the sensitivity as far as possible. It’s hairtrigger reaction and reflexes. The slightest shiver

To be honest, Ryan doesn’t really pay attention to the game. He pays enough attention to get by, which doesn’t take much, and otherwise spends his time theorizing. Ray’s focused. Watching him is like watching a live wire, hissing and spitting with some unknowable current strung up in everything he does. Every movement jerks, thumbs twitching on the joysticks. It’s odd behavior for something that should be relaxing. And it’s not Ryan that’s making him awkward or something. It’s more than that. Above and beyond all that, it’s surprising, for someone in a role that requires absolute control. Ryan honestly thought the sniper had just gone to sleep while everyone else was drinking.

It takes Ryan twenty minutes of mindlessly shooting down whatever the enemy is in this year’s Call of Duty to put everything together. College taught him some critical thinking, after all.

Ryan boils it down to three core points, a trifecta to diagnose this situation down to its bones, as a cutscene unfolds on the screen. None of the plot or characters matter to him. Ray pulled out his phone, for God’s sake, the second that the game took control, and is scrolling through something or other with the controller dangling in his free hand.

Call it the grand unified theory of who Ray Narvaez, Jr. is.

  1. What’s happening right now is happening because Ray is trying to shake off the last hits of adrenaline from today.
  2. It isn’t working. Ryan knows the look of someone whose fight-or-flight response is still thumping nervously away, and Ray has it all over. Eyes are a little too wide, focus a little too aggressive. He hasn’t looked at Ryan once, his gaze fixed on the screen’s movement and flashing like it’s some kind of lifeline.
  3. Ryan knows that look because he’s seen himself wearing it. Were he a little less practiced, he could’ve been wearing it right now.



Ray’s hands twitch around the controller, executing a perfect headshot on the screen. Ryan lets himself get hit by a few bullets and tosses the controller onto the coffee table as his half of the screen bleeds red. The sound of the controller clattering seems to snap Ray out of whatever reverie he’s fallen into, fingers fumbling for a moment on the triggers.

“Come on,” Ryan says, heading towards the penthouse door. He pauses at the coffee table to pick out his pistol among the other weapons and now the controller scattered on the tabletop. Then, just to piss Ray off, he cuts mercilessly right in front of the television.

“What,” Ray says, pausing the game, “going to kidnap me if I don’t go with you? Geoff’ll be real fucking pissed if you do that, I’m telling you. Also, I’ll have to kill you. Probably should’ve put that first, honestly.”

“Nah. I’m in the mood for some diet Coke. We’re out. And if you don’t come with me, you’re going to have sit there for the rest of the night shooting pixel arrangements until you stop feeling like you’re going to explode if you keep still.”

There’s a long pause between them. For a minute Ryan thinks he might’ve been a little too harsh. It doesn’t make much sense. They’re harsh people. And sure, Ray doesn’t like being told what to do, but hopefully he’s smart enough to get the undertone which is _I get it, and this isn’t something you want to talk about while your boss is in the next room_.

It takes a few minutes.

Ryan’s hand is resting on the doorknob when the television clicks off and Ray pushes himself up from the couch. “You’re completely fucking insane,” Ray says. It’s not the first time someone’s said that.

“So I’ve heard,” Ryan smiles, and turns the doorknob with a click. “Don’t bring your wallet. I’m buying.”

\---

Meg’s boots were the loudest thing in the whole damned bank.

There were some soft noises - whimpers and a few muffled sobs - as her and Ryan paced down the line towards their goal. Ryan had the drill, and Meg was taking care of the security cameras as they walked. Ryan, in contrast, kept his steps soft even in steel-toed boots. Really, he looks like her shadow in all of this - dressed mostly in black except for the jacket that he picked up with its blue and white stripes along the sleeves. It’s heavy enough even without kevlar underneath it.

He let Meg do most of the grandstanding. Detail-oriented as Ryan was, it made sense for him to basically back her up on each portion of the plan.

They made it through to the deposit boxes before the shouting started.

“Hey,” Ryan said, setting up the drill with gloved hands, “guess what, it’s the police.” Earlier than expected, which is bad for their plan, but not unworkable.

“Yup.” Meg kept her eyes focused on what they were doing. “What do you think - bail or go for it?”

Ryan stepped back from the drill and tugged the new assault rifle out of the duffel bag he kept thrown over his shoulder. “I’ll go take a look,” he offered. “Keep drilling and I will be back in a few minutes unless I get myself killed.”

Needless to say, he mowed down quite a few police officers that day. They started out with your average patrol cops. As Ryan turned the corner, one of them saw the skull mask and the rifle and didn’t hesitate in pulling the trigger. A little happy to jump the gun, so to speak. There was a lot of panic happening, as far as Ryan could tell. Bank robberies didn’t generally involve one of the two robbers walking back out to confront the police directly.

The recoil from the rifle knocked back hard into his shoulder. There would be a bruise later - something he poked and prodded at until the pain sharpened to its most precise point.

Ryan did his best to discourage any wayward police from getting a little too close. Bullets pinged past him. Luck ran out as one grazed him. He was more pissed about the jacket than anything even as blood leaked hot and slow down his arm. He ducked back behind the wall and shook out the pain, clenching his hand into a fist. He’d been hurt worse than this. Hell, he’d had nightmares alone about worse than this.

For a second he almost said _Meg_.

Instead, Ryan fired a few more shots towards some cops struggling to make it inside the door without experiencing a gunshot wound. They ducked back outside as glass exploded outwards. He ducked back behind the wall and headed back towards the safety deposit boxes. The police were going to go in cautiously, which gave them a few minutes to escape.

The grinding of the drill at work had faded out too. That was either a good sign or a bad sign.

He peered around the corner. Meg was yanking something out of a box, the drill laying on its side useless and dead.

“Well,” she said, delicately stepping around some debris, “we’re very fucking rich right now.”

“And dead,” Ryan reminded her, “unless we get moving right now.”

Her lips moved downwards in something approximating a pout. And if Ryan loved her at any point, loved her in the way people _think_ when they talk about Doll Face and the Vagabond, it was maybe that moment, that simpering grin. “They’re just not any fun.”

“Well, they can’t let people like us get away with it. That’d set a bad example.” He scooped up the duffel bag after zipping it up and threw it over his shoulder. “Let’s go.”

The plan sort of fell apart right after that. They weren’t expecting a full police barricade of all things. Meg spotted that infamous bright orange Vacca just parked fifteen feet down the fucking street, Ryan hotwiring a damn sports car while Meg kept the police off of him. And he remembers laughing a little the whole time, something bright and joyous wound up inside of him like a coiled spring.

If he had known that this kind of crime would be this much fun, he would’ve known how to answer his college advisor way earlier when she asked him what the hell he wanted to do with his life. This. Definitely this. A bullet pinged off the side of the Vacca and Ryan yelled something incoherent, a _fuck you_ because the car really didn’t deserve that. A spark nearly caught on his glove and he shook out his hand for a second as Meg ducked behind the open door again.

The engine purred and turned over.

Meg vaulted and slid over the hood of the car, yanking open the passenger door and ducking inside right as Ryan hit the accelerator.

“What if they threw down spikes,” Meg said.

Ryan shook his head. “Too soon. We just got the car.”

A bullet punctured right through the driver’s window and hit Ryan in the shoulder. He snarled, a noise he didn’t even know he was capable of before this, and kept to driving with his knees and one hand instead, the injured arm pressed up tight against his body.

“Oh, shit,” Meg hissed, “you okay?”

“I’m good,” Ryan nodded, “I’m good, I’m -”

He threw the car with a screech to the write, forcing his injured arm back up in order to yank the car back onto a straight line down a side street. Meg stared at him for a moment. “You were right,” he said, drawing the hand connecting to his injured arm back from the wheel. “They threw down spikes. But I fucking _saw_ them do it, so it didn’t work how they wanted.”

“Y’know, maybe we shouldn’t have stolen the bright orange sports car. I’m just thinking about how easy it’d be for a helicopter to track us down.”

“It’s okay. We’ll, uh - we’ll switch in a minute here.”

His blood was dripping onto the leather seat. Meg looked at him for a moment.

“Your blood isn’t registered in some super secret government database, right? Just in case.”

“To the best of my knowledge,” Ryan replied dryly, “it is not, no.”

“Okay. Good.” She scanned the street for a second. “Let’s steal a fucking station wagon. For kicks.”

“Not very sexy for our heist escape vehicle.”

“Says the guy bleeding all over the place.”

“Listen, some people could find that sexy. I try not to judge people for their perversions as much as possible.”

He still ended up hotwiring a second car, and it was this ugly olive station wagon that looked like it barely could move. Meg giggled the whole time, probably at the look on his face as he broke the window and avoided touching the vehicle itself as much as possible. It was not a glamorous end, but the glamour had been there throughout the rest of it.

They left the station wagon in a parking lot from her apartment and walked the rest of the way, Ryan ducking into a supermarket bathroom to wash most of the face paint off after he stowed the mask in the bag with the drill.

“You look so much nicer. It’s kind of creepy.” Meg had bought herself a water and him a bottle of diet Coke while he was cleaning himself up.

Ryan winked. “I can’t let you get too comfortable.”

\---

They stop at a 24/7 twenty minutes away from the penthouse. They passed by a few closer ones, but Ryan set himself down a certain path. And he hadn’t actually been to this particular location yet. Setting down new roots, one could say. He parks in front of the convenience store and takes a minute to center himself.

They didn’t talk on the way there. Ray was pretty obviously uncomfortably, pressing himself against the passenger door as if expecting to have to roll out onto the asphalt at any second.

“I’m seriously not going to kidnap you,” Ryan pointed out as the car hummed gently at an intersection.

“Sure,” Ray replied. “Okay.” Skeptical as could be.

Now, though, the two of them are staring down the bright fluorescent lights of the all-American gas station. Ryan reaches for the door handle and Ray makes a sort of strangled noise. “You’ve got the fucking face paint on, dude. Are you serious?” _Are you serious_ seems to be the main question from most of the crew at everything Ryan does. He’s begun to suspect that, as much of a flair for the dramatic as they seemed to have, he’s still got a leg up on the rest of them.

Ryan winks.

Ray groans a little and tugs his glasses off in order to rub his eyes. “Alright,” he spits, “fine, whatever, fuck you.”

Entering the store is a process in itself. Ray drags his feet like some sulking teenager, hands shoved into the pockets of his hoodie.

Ryan hums softly to himself as he wanders around the aisles. Ray immediately breaks off towards the refrigerator. By the time Ryan gets a look at him again, Ray is holding approximately four Monster energy drinks in his hands, balancing them carefully. Even though Ryan occupied himself with examining a display of snacks, he definitely felt eyes on him, and not from the cashier’s direction. Ray keeps shooting him nervous looks from across the store, as if trying to predict what he’s doing.

Ryan calmly picks up a bag of Lays and heads over to the fridge to pick up a few bottles of diet Coke.

He walks over to the counter. Ray sets his various energy drinks down.

The cashier, to her credit, makes a good effort at not staring too much at Ryan’s paint. Ryan smiles brightly at her and she goes about scanning all the items faster. The three of them stand there in utter silence, Ray still a good foot behind Ryan.

“Thirteen dollars and seventy-four cents, please,” the cashier says.

Ryan nods and slides his hand towards his back pocket. His fingers wrap around the grip of his pistol. “Oh,” he says softly, smile sharpening a little, “Guess I forgot my wallet.”

“Hey,” Ray begins, apprehension clearly audible, and Ryan yanks his pistol out of its holster and aims it square at the cashier’s chest.

Before she can compute what’s happening, he swings his aim up towards the security camera and pulls the trigger.

She freezes, mouth hanging open.

Ryan idly remarks, “This is a robbery, by the way.”

Her hands skitter along the counter towards something out of view, probably some kind of button for a silent alarm. Ryan clicks his tongue and fires a warning round into the counter. The worst cashier makes a soft breathy noise of fear, nearly a squeak, and backs up a few inches with her hands in the air. He gestures with the gun towards the register, smiling a little at her.

“Go ahead,” he tells her. “You know what the deal is.”

Her eyes flicker between him and Ray.

Surprisingly, Ray’s voice seems to have hit its usual stride. His tone smooths itself out. “I’d fucking do it. This asshole does _not_ hesitate to shoot people, I can tell you that for free.” Ryan smiles despite himself. He really does like Ray the most out of all of them, as far as he can tell. Normally he’d be making a lot more snap judgments, and maybe he’s wearing rose-tinted glasses thanks to being close to Gavin.

Yet the preference stands.

The cash register chimes softly as it swings open. The only sounds are low breathing and the soft pop music playing throughout the station.

Coins rattle and clink against each other. Ryan takes out his wallet and slips sixty-three dollars inside.

“Could you bag everything for us, please?” Ryan keeps grinning. He doesn’t lower the gun.

The girl’s hands tremble and she nearly drops a bottle of diet Coke in the process of trying to shove everything into a bag. Then she double bags it on principle as the single bag shudders under the strain. What a dear, honestly.

Ryan jerks his head towards the bag. Ray leans forward and plucks it up from the countertop.

“Have a nice night,” Ryan tells her, his aim focused on her all the way to the door. He gives her a little two fingered salute as he opens the door and lets Ray walk out first.

It takes two seconds after the glass door swings shut before Ray swings around and jabs a finger at Ryan’s chest. “What the _fuck_ was that.”

“Just a way to escalate things a little faster,” Ryan says. He unlocks the sedan and climbs in, setting the bag down in the back of the car. Ray shoves himself into the passenger seat.

Evidently Ray’s waiting for them to pull out of the parking lot. Ryan circles them around just out of sight of the store’s windows and waits. He pops open a bottle of diet Coke with a hiss. Ah. There we go. The night’s progressing much better now.

“The fuck?” Ray begins, unbuckling his seatbelt in order to seemingly get out of the car. “I’m not camping out here with your creepy ass all night, people watching or whatever.”

“Hey,” Ryan says, leaning a little closer to the windshield, “look.”

In the distance, red and blue lights look dazzling against the night sky. Someone’s showing up to crash their little party.

“Fuck me,” Ray snarls, yanking out a gun from whatever holster he had strapped on. “Fuck this.”

Ryan hums a few lines from _Les Miserables_ to himself as he sets the stick back into drive - _there’s a reckoning still to be reckoned, and there’s going to be hell to pay at the end of the day_.

\---

It was an argument of purpose. It had nothing to do with the cash.

The cash, well - they just split it in half. It was easy enough with two. They halved the time and the work and the body count, so they cut the reward in half.

Meg wanted them to keep working together, and Ryan wouldn’t have minded, except there was something vital they disagreed on. Meg focused on the money and the physical reward. Ryan, on the other hand, found himself watching news footage late into the night and over the next few days, the mask staring up at him from the coffee table. God, did he love the way things _looked_ on the television, the bright sensationalized sheen the media poured on top of everything. He knew it looked like a kid who just got a shiny new toy and couldn’t stop looking it over, touching it, afraid to let it go in case he wasn’t able to get it back.

“You’re getting fucking obsessed,” Meg told him from the kitchen, clattering around with pots and pans. Her tone did not make it sound like a casual jab at Ryan’s newest focus in life.

“I’m not,” Ryan protested.

“You are. It’s fucking weird.”

“I appreciate the spectacle. That’s all.”

“Well, it’s one thing to say that when you’re watching someone else on TV. If you’re not careful, Haywood, you might start to convince me you’re an honest-to-God narcissist, which I didn’t think you were. And I don’t work with people like that. It’s dangerous.”

Her tone actually sounded like a threat.

“What’s the fucking problem, then?” On the screen, grainy footage of the two of them briefly showed up behind the panel of worried police specialists.

“You - look, I don’t know why you did this, why you got into all of this. I thought it was about the money. That’s how it always goes, right? Good stock standard college kid with good grades drops out of college and gets into our kind of business because they’re drowning in debt or whatever. But you don’t even seem to _care_. I was so sure I was going to wake up in the middle of the night and you’d be writing out a check to some bank for your loans, but you’re just - sitting there with it.”

_We’re arguing_ , he realized faintly. That was something new. “How is that a God damn issue? Me saving my money is a problem now?”

“It’s not that!” Oh. She was yelling. “It’s - It’s like you’re getting caught up in all the drama, in the public idea of what we are, ignoring the fact that we’re _criminals_ and we _kill people_ and that this weird fucked up idealized version you’re living in isn’t what is happening! This isn’t one of your fucking college plays -”

“That’s _not how I see this_ -”

At some point Ryan had stood up. He didn’t really know when it happened, but now he was pretty much looming right over Meg. Sometimes he forgot how fucking small she was compared to him, but this moment really proved it.

“Then how the hell are you seeing it? Explain, because you’re really starting to freak me out.”

“I don’t get how you’re _not_ seeing it. This - the spectacle, the drama, whatever you want to call it - that’s the one part of this that actually matters. The money’s going to disappear whenever we spend it on utilities and bills and all the other shit we have to. But this - if you play your cards right, if you do things correctly - it _matters_ and it _lasts_. That’s what I got out of all this. So I guess I just don’t understand what the hell you got if not that.”

“Uh,” Meg pointed out, “the fucking cash, obviously.”

“That’s it. That’s all there is.”

“Yeah. I’m not getting existential over this thing that I do for a living.”

“Okay,” Ryan muttered softly. There was the barest hint of a laugh threaded throughout the word. “Alright. I guess I just look at all of this a hell of a lot differently than you do.”

“I guess you do.”

The silence sat between them for a while, festering and growing. It festered and grew for about a week, with them growing more uncomfortable and Ryan becoming restless. He had finally discovered this thing that separated them.

Two weeks in and he was packing his bags. Meg didn’t even stop him from taking one of her duffle bags, but considering she had about four laying around ready for use, he figured she’d probably be okay with it. She leaned in the doorway, her hair wet from a shower and hanging around her shoulders. “Heading out, huh?”

“Yeah.” He zipped up the duffle bag. “I hope you don’t mind me taking some weapons.”

Meg waved a hand. “I don’t have your hard-on for giant fucking rifles. Go ahead.”

He laughed softly. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

He laced up his boots. Meg was drying her hair, and it was like nothing was going to change at all. Ryan actually did feel a little tug of something. Meg had helped him - helped establish him, even. Part of him felt like he owed her more, but another more rational part of him knew that staying wasn’t going to do any good for them.

She walked out of the bathroom in time to see him swing the bag over his shoulder.

“Okay,” she said. Evidently she was struggling for some other words and failing miserably.

Ryan walked over and wrapped her up in a hug. Her body stiffened as if expecting him to try and break her spine in half or something. He kept his touch soft.

“I’m going to miss you,” she mumbled into his shoulder. “Even if you’re weird and kind of fucked up.”

He rested his chin on top of her head for a second. “I’m sure we’ll run into each other again at some point. Probably doing something overdramatic. We’ve got too much of the same social circle.”

“I’ll end up dating one of your friends,” Meg offered, “because I’m sure you have to get at least one of those at some point in your life. And because we share all these _secrets_ and shit, they’ll break up with me because they think I’m cheating on them with you.”

“That’s exact.”

“Hey, if that’s not how it happens, I owe you a whole case of diet Coke.” The two of them stepped apart.

Ryan was laughing a little. It was a strange noise, something with a little more emotion in it than he strictly wanted. “Better start saving now.”

The two of them took a second.

“Don’t get killed, Meg,” he offered. She froze for a second. He could almost see her brain working on how he had got a hold of her name. After a second her jaw relaxed again, the corners of her eyes crinkling a little.

Then she punched him gently in the shoulder. “You don’t freak me out like that again. Have a good time. Find the one other person on Earth who agrees with your weird philosophical garbage but _also_ kills people. There’s got to be at least one fucked up bastard out there who’s on board with what you’re talking about.”

“I’ll try,” he agreed.

He did try. He still does.

\---

“Just so you know,” Ray yells over the sirens and the gunshots, the car’s engine rumbling, “I don’t actually have enough ammo for all of this bullshit. I would’ve brought some, ‘cause I don’t want you to think I’m underprepared or anything, but I didn’t know you’d be bringing every single cop car in -”

“Under the backseat.”

“What?”

“Under the fucking backseat, there’s some ammo boxes under there - don’t ask, okay, I had some bad experiences in cars.”

“Oh, fuck you, fuck -”

Ryan instantly regrets telling Ray that, because Ray wastes no time in crawling over the console, cursing the whole time as he wedges himself in between the two seats. An old sneaker nearly knocks Ryan in the face. He reaches up with one hand to grab Ray’s ankle and shove it away. The kid’s squirming his way over into the back, and it takes a few seconds. Ryan ducks aside as a police car tries to pull up parallel to him.

They careen up onto the sidewalk for a minute, the force of it letting Ray bounce into the backseat.

Ray’s head pops up from the back, his glasses knocked a little askew. There’s the sound of rounds clattering around against each other as he starts to reload his gun.

“Grenades are under there too. If it gets bad enough.” Ryan glances in the rearview mirror. Well, what do you know. “In case it looks bad enough.”

“The hell does that fucking mean?” Ray starts trying to roll down his own window.

A Transporter pulls up parallel to them. Ryan slams his elbow through his own driver’s side window, the window shattering, and fires a few shots through the hole. A headlight explodes and the vehicle moves away from them a little - Ryan drops his aim a few feet and pops the tire with a few bullets. The Transporter starts swerving a little more wildly, falling back behind them, the cop visible in front yelling something. They’ve gone back into a normal pursuit

By the time he focuses on Ray again, the sniper has apparently found the grenades. Good for him.

No helicopters yet, though, which means they’re doing well. Ryan doesn’t actually have an RPG in this car - which he really should, now that he thinks about it. He swerves around a few confused civilian cars, a SUV and a sedan drifting towards the sides of the road as if they aren’t sure what to do with themselves.

Ryan fires a few more shots towards the windshield to discourage them. They impact without breaking through, because the Los Santos police are smart enough and well-funded enough to invest in bulletproof glass. He snaps out a curse and tosses his pistol back into the passenger seat. There’s no point.

Then Ryan realizes. “Ray, are you fucking cooking a grenade _in the back of my car_?”

“Yeah,” Ray says, “I don’t know why, out of everything that’s going on, that’s a big deal to you.”

“Because this is _my_ fucking car, and I’ve never seen you prove you can even use a grenade. You’re the sniper, for God’s sake, not Michael -”

Ryan watches as Ray leans out his open window and doesn’t even throw the grenade behind them - he underhands it, like he’s rolling a ball for a dog.

People think grenades create this huge explosion. They don’t.

There’s a bang, though, and something like a puff of air. Behind them, the Transporter spins out right into a storefront, the back bumper hanging off of the car’s frame. Ryan laughs despite himself, the sound bubbling up from his chest and throat. It’s a primal thing. Ray grins wildly back at him, looking almost surprised that it even worked.

The grenade and the Transporter seem to have discouraged the rest of the police from following them. That, or they’re concerned with casualties.

Ray collapses back in his seat. Ryan pulls them into a side alley and then into some nearly deserted parking lot behind a defunct business. Ray’s smiling a little at him, and it’s a look Ryan likes now that he’s gotten to see it. Ryan’s voice scratches up his throat, hoarse with yelling and dust and adrenaline. “How’re you feeling?”

He physically sees Ray remember that he’s supposed to be pissed at him. “Like I don’t get what the fuck you’re doing.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“It fucking does. Why’d you decide to just rob someone for no reason? You had the money. I saw you pull out your wallet - that shit wasn’t empty.”

Ryan shrugs. “Answer my question and then I’ll answer yours. Be polite about it.” There must be just enough of an edge in his tone where Ray shuts up and stares at him for a moment. Of course, Ray’s stubborn as hell, so they sit there in silence for a few minutes. Ryan turns off the engine just to make a point, so it gets even quieter. Ray sighs and folds in on himself a little, pressing against the corner of the car like he’d rather be anywhere else in the whole world.

“I’m tired,” Ray finally answers. “That’s how I fucking feel.”

Ryan tilts his head. “Get back up in front.”

Ray pauses as if debating whether or not to obey a direct order. After a minute, he seems to figure that arguing on this point isn’t worth it, and he climbs out of the back and yanks open the passenger door.

Ryan sets them on a slow roundabout path to the penthouse. “I’m going to make a few guesses, and you can tell me if you’re wrong.”

“Trust me,” Ray mutters, “I’m _definitely_ going to tell you that.”

“After pretty much everything that the crew does, I’m betting you’re the only one who can’t just immediately pass out. Unless you’re injured. That doesn’t count, if you’re planning on being a smartass. Everyone else gets tired, like normal. You get keyed up. So you get involved in some simulated violence, Call of Duty or whatever you’re interested in at the time, because it helps you wind down. But not really.”

He glances over and gets a good look at the back of Ray’s head. He’s staring out the window, very pointedly not making eye contact. “What’re you,” Ray snaps, “my fucking shrink?”

“You don’t feel like that now, do you?”

Ray finally turns to look at him for a moment. “No, okay? No. I fucking don’t. I mean, now I’m just pissed off at you, so who knows how I feel -”

“Look,” Ryan cuts him off, “after the heist, you need to do something like this? You let me know. I do the same thing. I was fucking surprised when the victory lap from the rest of the crew was drinking and then passing out. Seemed a little abrupt. But I’m glad that you and I can agree on something.”

Ray doesn’t say anything for a few moments. “Okay. Let’s say you’re not wrong. Let’s pretend for a second here that I give you the benefit of the doubt.”

“Oh, okay. Let’s pretend together, you and I. Sure. _Pretending_.”

“If we were pretending,” Ray continues, and his tone is definitely failing him here, “I’d say that I _might_ take you up on your offer.”

Ryan stares over at him. “Are we going to beat around the bush forever? And pretend that I’m not right?”

“Jesus fucking Christ.” Ray toys with the strings of his hoodie. “Y’know, before you got here, Geoff gave us all a briefing. Filling us in on who you were, your skillset, the feeling he got. And he told us that he thought you were ‘a real piece of fucking work’. Those were his exact words. And I thought that meant one thing, but I don’t think Geoff even knew what he meant.”

“Is that a bad thing to you?” It’s late enough where they seem to be getting a little heart-to-heart about all of this. God forbid, they’re even becoming sincere.

Ray exhaled. “No. No, I don’t think so.”

“Good. I’m glad.”

Ryan reaches over into the back and picks up the bag of food off the floor. He opens another diet Coke and holds out one of Ray’s Monsters.

Ray laughs a little finally before reaching out and taking it. He leans back in his seat and pops the can open. “I can’t believe I’m agreeing to this shit. I can’t believe - I can’t believe I just gave in.”

“I’m very convincing.”

“Or terrifying.”

Ryan moves his hand in a little back and forth motion. “Little bit of column A, little bit of column B?”

“Alright, asshole,” Ray says, setting his drink down in the cup holder. “Can we get back to the penthouse now?”

“Sure. Because you asked so nicely.”

“I’m the nicest person you’re ever going to fucking meet. Motherfucker.”

Ryan laughs again despite himself, warmth rising in his chest.

\---

So when Ryan looks at Ray, maybe he remembers that lecture Meg gave him, that she hoped he found someone who got him, really got him, in ways she couldn’t. And him and Ray aren’t exactly the same. Ray doesn’t understand the thing with the news footage, doesn’t put points down on a mental scoreboard for every second of perfect groundbreaking footage. Ray believes in performance but not in the spectacle. Ryan doesn’t understand the way Ray can distance himself so easily, how he turns attachment on and off like a faucet.

Even if the faucet leaks a little when it comes to the crew. Ray gets protective. Ray even gets angry when someone gets themselves injured, and sometimes he’s angry at himself for not providing perfect cover.

No functioning system is perfect, after all.

Neither are they. They argue a lot. Ryan has a love of being right, and Ray has an equal if not greater love of proving people wrong. But the arguing pulls itself down into something else, something a little fond, where Ray nudges him halfway through and goes _we need to stop being idiots before Gavin shows up, ‘cause he won’t shut up about it for like, thirty years_.

And those moments, Ryan looks at Ray because he’s never been bound to dating a woman, not precisely, never had a problem with liking just about anyone in a way that leans towards genuine affection, and thinks _do I dare, do I dare -_

He doesn’t. Because Ray’s not there yet. Ray may not be there for a while.

Eventually Ray starts taking him up on that offer. They sneak out after heists, after just about anything big and explosive but not quite _enough_ and cool down with small crimes. With convenience store robberies and breaking into aristocratic rich assholes’ houses and antagonizing cops in petty ways. Ryan learns what Ray’s actual laugh sounds like the first time they break into some rich guy’s house and break all of his fine china because he’s not home. They don’t even actually steal anything. Just because. And Ray starts fucking _giggling_ a little as Ryan drops two crystal glasses on the kitchen floor, glass crunching underfoot. “You’re crazy,” he’s gasping, “ _I’m_ fucking crazy, oh my _God_.”

Ray hurls a very expensive plate right into the guy’s sixty-four-inch plasma screen a minute later. The screen cracks. The plate just outright shatters.

“Some God damned beautiful shit,” Ryan says behind him. He’s really staring at the outline of Ray’s body, familiar by now as the frame of a gun.

\---

In the middle of the heist, Ray shoots the armored truck’s wheels out from a rooftop. And Ryan’s waiting right there with a shotgun, drags the driver out, and blows him away like it’s nothing. It’s all perfectly timed, and it almost looks choreographed with the ease of it. “That’s the R&R Connection,” Ray crows into his mic, and Ryan blinks. That’s a new one. It’s some juvenile shit, fucking _R &R connection_, nothing highbrow about it.

He kind of loves it.

“Damn fucking right,” Ryan agrees, and he forces open the back of the armored truck like nothing happened.

Later, Geoff rags on them about it. “The R&R fuckin’ connection, what kind of gay shit is that, honestly?”

“Our gay shit,” Ray tells him, leaning up on his toes to wrap an arm around Ryan’s shoulders in a display of physical affection to add the punchline to the joke. Ryan’s shoulders, admittedly, are shaking a little with barely restrained laughter. There’s just this absolute confidence in what Ray’s saying. “So get off our asses.”

“Yeah, doing whatever you guys do after heists. You really think none of us noticed you two sneaking off at some point? You aren’t fucking subtle, let me tell you that.” Oh, shit. Well. The jig is up.

“About as subtle as a bullet in the head,” Ryan admits, and Ray punches him hard in the shoulder. Ray absolutely knows that’s a gentle jab at him. Ryan rubs his shoulder a little just to give Ray that small victory.

“Seriously,” Gavin pipes up, “what do you guys _do_?”

“Oh, God, what’d we even do last time, Ry?” Ray asks. Ryan doesn’t mind the nickname. He thought he might at first, but it’s grown on him.

“Fuck, uh - last time, all I remember is you shooting off a firework in the middle of that antique store.”

Ray covers his face for a second. “I fucking forgot about that.”

“You _what_ ,” Michael says flatly.

“Ryan handed me a firework launcher right before some cops showed up and started shooting. So, firework launchers are kind of big, if you didn’t know, so I did the only thing I could with the only weapon I had and I - shot a cop right in the chest with a firework.”

“Is there a reason that wasn’t on the news?” Michael’s definitely skeptical.

“I don’t think _cop thrown into his own patrol car by a firework_ makes a very good news headline, Michael.” Ryan feels like he has to defend their little nighttime escapades.

Gavin, for once, comes up with the smartest question. They must be in desperate times after all. “Why did you have a sodding _firework launcher_ to begin with?”

Ryan shrugs. “I thought it might be fun to use. And it was.”

“You guys,” Jack begins. Then he shakes his head and goes back to popping open a beer.

\---

One winter afternoon, Ryan gets a text from an number he doesn’t recognize.

**+3231150942** : Glad to see you’re doing good

**Ryan** : Excuse me? How’d you get this number

**+3231150942** : Guess who? <3

He has to take a second. Then he squints down at the heart and realizes that there’s just about one person on Earth who would get his number and then throw a heart down next to a text like that. Hell, there’s not many people who would be able to actually get his personal number. It takes effort to be that convincing.

**Ryan** : Meg?

**+3231150942** : There you go! I saw some of that news footage, jsyk. Lookin good, mask totally works for you

**Ryan** : That’s a Los Santos area code you’re using

**Meg** : Hell yeah it is

**Meg** : I’m in town for a little while. Drinks? I mean as long as we find a bar that’s got diet Coke

**Ryan** : I know a few places

**Meg** : Of course you do. You’ve got Coke radar

**Meg** : That sounded really bad

**Ryan** : Okay, fuck you for that one

**Meg** : I can’t even blame autocorrect

**Ryan** : Also sure. When?

Ray, in the kitchen, microwaving one of the Hot Pockets he left in Ryan’s own freezer: “You’re grinning like a dumbass, dude. Who’re you texting? Hot girlfriend?”

“No,” Ryan says, “no. Hot, maybe, but pretty much the opposite of a girlfriend.”

\---

Life’s good sometimes and bad a lot of other times. Ryan spends a lot of time getting himself shot or stabbed with the crew. One time a grenade goes off too close and he spends a full week resting up after Jack plucked the shrapnel out of his arms and chest. Another time he gets shot right in the thigh and nearly bleeds out in the car back to the penthouse, Jack doing his best to apply pressure.

Ryan ends up on Mount Chiliad with Ray after heist number eight. They’re staring down at Los Santos lights. There are people down there. There are a _lot_ of people down there. There are a lot of open stores. There are a lot of people thinking they’re safe in their houses.

Ray shuffles a little closer to the edge. He makes a finger gun down at the tallest tower in Los Santos and fires, mouthing _bang_. Ryan chuckles a little to himself. From up here, it really looks like you could knock that tower right down.

“Let’s go,” Ryan says, stretching a little, arms behind his head..

Ray grins and turns back towards the car. “I’ll drive.”

“As long as you promise not to crash the car. I like this one.”

“I’ll try.”

Ryan laughs and tugs the mask on again, smudging some greasepaint along his fingers as he does. Okay. Time to go to work.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Little Pistol" by Mother Mother. They're just a very pre-Fake AH band to me.


End file.
